Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Sort of answering really important questions about, in this case, armor about military equipment and technology that archeologists can’t answer by using all the literary, so all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It’s really cool. It’s really cool that you see that there’s a hole in the literature and nobody studied it, and going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this. I don’t know, I think it’s an amazing mystery about the ancient world. I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I’ve done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I’m interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there’s people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I’m simpler. I just want to know how did this work? So almost all of my books that I’ve written, have started with some just how did something work, and I’m trying to just figure out that aspect of it, and that’s just, maybe it’s a personality thing. I also have a sciency background, so I think I’ve used a lot of that. Even though I’m a humanist and a historian, I’ve used a lot of hard science in my work. I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff, and I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background, helps with those sorts of projects. Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history. And I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.